CHAPTER 2
Heinlein
Faraway System
One Standard Year Later
Sitting up in bed, Nickson was briefly unable to remember where he was. He’d had that same nightmare again, reliving Captain Ogleman’s last moments. He rubbed his face vigorously with his hands, and looked around his bedroom. He might as well get up; he wasn’t going to be getting back to sleep tonight.
SNORK! ZZZZzzzzz…
He looked down at the woman next to him. She was asleep, snoring away peacefully. Oh…right. He remembered going out and chatting her up, but the rest of it was…fuzzy. Katy. Her name was Katy. Maybe. Kylie? Carly? Feh. It would come to him. The sun was beginning to lighten the horizon, but it was still early. Too early to be up after the night he’d had, but Nickson hardly ever slept for more than a few hours at a time. His doctor said it was to be expected after his ordeal in space, but he wasn’t sure that it was really that.
No, he was restless. Not in the sense that he had difficulty sleeping. He’d been dirtside for a year, mostly drinking his savings away, wondering what in the hell he was going to do with himself. As he’d promised the late Captain Ogleman, he’d managed to get the Madeline Drake home to Heinlein. With the captain’s death, legal ownership of the Maddy D. had passed to his estate. The ship was promptly sold off to ensure the crew still got paid, and that all debts were settled. It was a grim necessity since they’d failed to complete their last contract. Nickson’s share was enough to pay his rent and keep him well supplied with booze, but he was still unemployed.
He needed to get back to work. He needed to get back into space. Dirtside life had a lot going for it: every creature comfort imaginable, women, real sunshine, all the air you could breathe, and natural gravity. It was the environment humankind was meant to live in. Yet, for all that, it was…dull. Space was an intrinsically hostile environment and, despite the routine of interstellar travel, remained quite dangerous. It was home to the spacer, though, and Nickson Armitage had been a spacer all his life. He’d been born on a ship. He had been more than a standard year old before he was ever brought down to the surface of a planet.
Barefoot, dressed only in his shorts, Nickson found himself lured to the kitchen by the smell of brewing coffee. The appliances were programmed to start making it as soon as he got out of bed. He tapped a control panel to get its attention. “Bacon, six strips, crispy.” The appliances acknowledged and got to work making his breakfast. It’d be a few minutes before it would be ready. Sitting down at the table, he picked up his tablet and tapped the screen.
He disinterestedly browsed through local, colonial, and interstellar news, skimming the headlines but not reading any of the articles. Colonial market reports. The city of Coventry, Heinlein’s colonial capital and Nickson’s home, was going to begin an expansion of the spaceport. Sports stories. Comical videos of people’s pets. The weather forecast. Apparently the Concordiat Defense Force was sending troops to far-flung Zanzibar in an attempt to stabilize the recently annexed colony. Then an icon flashed on the screen: new job listings that might interest him. Hmm.
Pouring himself a cup of coffee, Nickson sat back down and opened the listings. He’d been watching the job boards for ships looking for officers to add to their crew. There were usually a fair number of spacer jobs to be found this way, but officer positions were much less common. The turnover rate for ship’s officers was much lower than for regular crew, and most captains preferred to keep their same core staff as they got to know and trust them. He had it set up so that he’d be immediately notified of any officer billet that opened up, on any kind of ship, just to keep his options open.
A free trader named the Marco Polo was looking for an experienced astrogator. Astrogation was not his area of expertise, but he knew enough to do the job and could fake the rest for an interview. He tagged that one for later. La Garda Interstellar, the largest freight company on Heinlein, had numerous officer positions open. That would be a last resort. It was steady work, but the pay was mediocre. Serving on a bulk freighter was about as dull as being in space could be.
A local energy conglomerate needed engineers for its transport and refinery ships. This type of work involved harvesting helium-3, hydrogen, and deuterium from the Faraway system’s gas giants, refining them into useable reaction mass and fusion fuel, and transporting them across the system. Working in the energy sector was also good, steady work, though possibly even more dull than serving on an interstellar freighter. The ad stated the employee would stay planetside for a few months out of the year, and would never leave the system. It was the kind of work a spacer looked for if he had a family and wanted to settle down, which was, more or less, the opposite of Nickson Armitage. In any case, he wasn’t an engineer by trade, and all the other listed positions paid substantially less.
The last ad caught Nickson’s eye. A privateer called Andromeda was looking for a new first officer. He pulled up the publicly available registration information for the ship. Not bad, he thought. She was bigger than the Madeline Drake had been, and better armed, too. She was a Polaris class, from Winchell-Chung Astronautical Industries. The type had been recently superseded in low-rate production by the Polaris-II, but was still very formidable. Something like that, Nickson thought, would make an ideal privateer. Her class had the right combination of reaction-mass tankage, armament, cargo capacity, and crew berthing. She had a pretty impressive record, too. She’d been operating out of Heinlein for twenty-five local years, which equated to about twenty standard years. Staying in the business that long and still being both profitable and in one piece told Nickson that this ship’s skipper knew what he was doing.
The pay was listed as negotiable, but that was standard practice for that sort of position. Nickson was, by his own estimation, a pretty good negotiator besides. He sent an inquiry along with his resume. The Maddy D. had had a pretty good service record, before her fateful final contract, and he had references to verify his experience. He’d worked his way up from pilot to XO under Captain Ogleman, and had done everything from cargo runs to pirate hunting. A ship like the Andromeda was exactly what he was looking for.
“Nickson?” It was a woman’s voice. He looked up to see his guest standing in the doorway to his bedroom, naked except for the patterned stockings he’d left on while undressing her, which she’d fallen asleep in. She was tall, curvy, and…buxom. Blonde curls spilled over her shoulders and down her back.
“Hey…you!” he said. Harley? Was it Harley? “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
She smiled with those full lips of hers. “No, hon. It’s so early. What are you doing up?”
“Just checking the news and such. You want some coffee? Breakfast?”
“We could have breakfast…or you could get back in here and say good morning the proper way.”
Nickson raised his eyebrows. “Well. It is rude to leave a guest wanting for company.” He stood up, his coffee forgotten, doffing his shorts as he followed what’s-her-name back to bed.